


All That We See or Seem

by SylvanWitch



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Atlantis is trying to kill people again, First Time, Ghost Sex, M/M, Masturbation, Mindfuck, Shower Sex, Temporary Character Death, season one AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 08:01:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21232475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Rodney McKay is overworked, underappreciated, and slowly losing his mind.  The nightmares of Atlantis' destruction are bad enough.  But the erotic dreams featuring a certain dead Air Force major are much, much worse.  What's a guy supposed to do when a dead man keeps trying to get him into bed?





	All That We See or Seem

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken without shame from Edgar Allan Poe's "Dream within a Dream." It's sort of thematic.

“Rodney, please.”

Elizabeth’s voice was weary, her face lined and pale with exhaustion.

Despite a pang of conscience at causing her grief, Rodney plowed ahead, striving to make his point over Colonel Sumner’s increasingly strident objections.

Stone-faced and obviously fuming, the colonel glared at Rodney from across the conference table in the room overlooking the stargate. Elizabeth had ordered the panels closed after the first bout of shouting half an hour earlier, and though Atlantis was pretty good about anticipating temperature changes, the air felt close and stuffy to Rodney, who was wondering if he had sweated through the underarms of his uniform shirt yet.

He hated the things—too tight by half and clingy in all the wrong places—but Elizabeth insisted on professional dress, and when he’d complained, she’d reminded him that having a uniform of sorts could act as an equalizer. 

It had taken Rodney a moment to realize she meant the military presence on Atlantis, with which it had become obvious she was uncomfortable.

In his spare time—precious minutes of consciousness in the shower or over a hastily consumed meal—Rodney worried about what might happen if Sumner declared martial law and unseated Elizabeth.

Most of the time, though, Rodney was too busy keeping Atlantis from killing anyone (else) to worry.

His dreams were another story.

In them, Atlantis fell again and again.

To the Wraith.

To a viral outbreak.

To age and decrepitude.

To a terminal error in her vast, as-yet-uncharted AI.

To terrorist bombs set off by the increasingly unhappy Athosians, who Sumner had effectively ghettoized in their own guarded section of the city.

In every nightmare scenario, it was Rodney’s failure that led to the city’s utter destruction. He wasn’t smart enough, fast enough, deft enough, convincing enough—or some combination of all of those—to divert tragedy before it unfolded in all its horrific, Technicolor, surround-sound glory.

And still, those weren’t the most disturbing of his dreams, just the most frequent.

No, the greatest disturbers of his slumber featured a mop of ridiculous hair, an infuriating smirk, a slouching competence, and a too-familiar voice saying his name.

“Dr. McKay?” Elizabeth asked in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time she’d said his name.

“Yes, yes, what?” he snapped reflexively, almost instantly regretting it when the expression on Elizabeth’s face grew colder, the skin around her eyes tighter. 

While it was true that most of the time Rodney was oblivious to other people’s feelings—and some of the rest of the time he simply didn’t care about them—he wasn’t entirely without empathy.

“Sorry,” he tried. “What do you need?”

“I was hoping that we could come to a compromise on the priorities list,” she said, a quality of strained patience in her diplomat’s voice.

“What’s to compromise? If we don’t stabilize the city’s power grid, there will be no city to protect. We won’t have to worry about the Wraith. We’ll all be dead.”

Rodney could be forgiven, he thought, for sounding like he was teaching college freshmen. It’s not like this was the first—or even the first hundredth—time he’d made the point. Without strong gene expressers, they were working with what Atlantis grudgingly gave them. Their best hope had been…

“Surely, there must be a way that we can do both,” Elizabeth suggested, eyes tracking from Rodney to Colonel Sumner.

He was already shaking his head, but he threw his hands up for good measure. 

“Fine. If you,” Rodney directed his glare squarely at the colonel, “want to allocate more research time to potential defense systems, then _you_ can be responsible for the dead marines when you stumble over something the Ancients thought was a great idea but that turns out to be, oh, I don’t know, _fairly terminal_ for those of us less,” he waved his hand to indicate the general population of Atlantis, himself (and possibly Elizabeth) excluded, “developed.”

Point made, Rodney crossed his arms and set his jaw. 

Colonel Sumner nodded curtly. “I need three scientists in three shifts, one for each of nine teams. You can double shifts if you spread ‘em out. No life sciences types. Math, physics, hell, engineers if you’re hard up. People who can look at a piece of tech and say, ‘Yep, that’ll kill something.’”

The colonel wore an ugly little smirk by the time he got to the end and raised a challenging eyebrow in Rodney’s direction.

Rodney opened his mouth, intent on delivering a blistering indictment of the colonel’s intellect, leadership abilities, and genetic profile, but Elizabeth spoke before he could wrangle coherence out of the raging fury Sumner’s attitude had caused.

“You can have two scientists—of any specialty—on two shifts, first and second. Use the grid divisions we’ve already worked up pick the areas of greatest strategic interest first and have them do initial assessments. If a site proves promising, I’ll let you have more personnel, but you can’t ask Dr. McKay to sacrifice so many people from his teams if you honestly expect us to survive being stranded here. Being able to defend ourselves from the Wraith won’t mean much if we all die of a fungal infection from failed water filtration systems.”

“I want Zelenka on point for this,” was Sumner’s counter-offer, and Elizabeth, mouth going thin, nodded tightly: “Fine.”

Rodney’s grievances were mounting as the two wrangled for his people without his input, and he was about to make known how little he enjoyed being ignored when Sumner stood, offered a terse, “Ma’am,” and exited without another word.

That deflated him somewhat.

“Rodney,” Elizabeth said, and Rodney noted the exhaustion on her face, the white around her lips and darkness staining the thin skin beneath her eyes. “I know this isn’t ideal, but we have to work with him. He’s not wrong about the Wraith.”

“Maybe if he hadn’t roused them to begin with—” Rodney began, but at a weary gesture from Elizabeth, he let his protest trail off.

“There’s nothing we can do about that now,” Elizabeth said, sounding like a kindergarten teacher spending the last crumbs of her patience. “And if we let the Wraith destroy us, Major Sheppard’s sacrifice will have been for nothing.”

She said his name the way they all did, with a kind of tight-throated, reverent hush, as if they were invoking some latter-day deity of bad hair and sarcasm.

Rodney himself didn’t quite see the appeal. Sure, the major had been a great gene carrier and not as gun-happy and gung-ho as most of the military types on Atlantis, but it wasn’t like any of them had had a lot of time to get to know him. He’d been there and then he was gone, “put out of his misery,” Sumner said. “It’s what he would have wanted.”

Rodney had a hard time imagining that anyone would prefer Sumner’s lethal-eyed sharp-shooting to a chance to be studied for the effects of Wraith feeding and the potential cure that would come with such research, but then, he was a scientist (even if he did have a certain disdain for the life sciences), so no one cared what he thought about Sheppard’s death.

Besides, Elizabeth wasn’t wrong: John Sheppard had given up his life to help protect Atlantis, and far be it from Rodney, insensitive as he knew he could sometimes be, to tear down that particular monument to foolish but noble martyrdom.

“Fine,” Rodney said in a conscious echo of Elizabeth’s tone—short and not-quite-sweet, the kind of sugar that masks a bitter aftertaste. He’d come to respect, if not exactly like, Elizabeth in the weeks since they’d raised Atlantis and won the attention of a race of vicious space vampires. He appreciated that she shared his view of what would happen if the military had control of Atlantis, but he didn’t fully trust her to be able to hold the high ground.

She was a diplomat, after all, and words in this case seemed meager protection against Colonel Sumner’s guns.

“Rodney,” Elizabeth cajoled, and Rodney unbent enough to give her a tight, fake smile before standing and preparing to leave.

“Thank you,” she continued, as if Rodney hadn’t been rude.

“Whatever for?” Inwardly, Rodney winced, recognizing the overly pedantic tone he took when he was feeling wrong-footed.

“For letting Sumner have his scientists.”

Rodney’s shrug felt ungracious, so he tried dipping his chin, too, and then he fled, sketching a wave over his shoulder before darting through the door and escaping to the relative comfort of his lab, a bright, cluttered space still sporting inert Ancient gadgets covered in a fine, silty dust and waiting for some free time so Rodney could tinker.

“Free time. Ha!” Rodney muttered, sliding onto his stool and opening his laptop to read the latest diagnostic reports from Zelenka’s power management team.

“Not good,” he said moments later. They had taxed the grid to the maximum amperage it could bear, at least in its current configuration. There were dead spots in the grid, strange, polygonal swatches where nothing would come on, no matter how many of their gene carriers wandered around the space gingerly touching consoles and wall panels.

No one had been able to figure out how these areas were supposed to be powered; there were no visible transmission lines in or out, and several of the spaces had no dedicated generator that they could find.

It was all a bunch of Ancient bullcrap, as Zelenka had so concisely put it the last time he and Rodney had had five minutes to spare for shared commiseration.

Misery, in this case, needed company.

In his more honest moments, Rodney allowed himself to feel a piercing loneliness. Isolated by his status, one-third of the uneasy power triangle attempting a tenuous control of Atlantis, he had no one to confide in except Zelenka, whose cautious deference sometimes grated on Rodney.

If it were caused by Zelenka’s genuine respect for Rodney as scientist, well, that would be fine.

But Rodney secretly suspected that Zelenka’s careful politeness was a mask he wore to disguise his true feelings, and those feelings, Rodney feared, tended toward relief at not being in Rodney’s shoes, or pity, or—and this was the worst—derision.

He’d spent too many years the object of ignorant bullies not to exercise a learned paranoia response.

Sometimes, Rodney knew he was being unfair. Often, he told himself he didn’t care. None of it made him feel any less alone.

The only thing that relieved his loneliness were the dreams of John Sheppard.

Alone in his room, the dim comfort of Atlantis’ lavender night light bathing his closed lids, Rodney dreamed of strong hands, narrow hips, long, blue-veined feet. He dreamed of a smirk gentled into something beautiful by mutual want. In his dream, Major Sheppard was just “John,” a name Rodney breathed reverently and then with some urgency as John dropped gracefully to his knees or wound a hand around him or sucked a love-mark on the thin skin over his collarbone.

He’d wake from these dreams with a heaving chest, sweat in his hairline, a hand cupping his half-hard cock, and a swallowed cry of desperate longing caught in his throat.

Rodney loved and hated these dreams in equal measure. Part of him wanted to let himself finish one of the dreams; sharing pleasure with a ghost was better than the yawning chasm in his belly when he bothered to bring himself off in the shower.

But part of him was worried that he’d built a fantasy sex life around a dead man. 

*****

Of course, Atlantis didn’t give him much time to fret, since the city was always trying to kill someone, and he was usually the first—and also the last—one people turned to when things got bad.

Day three of Sumner’s team sweeps in Quadrant SixE, the marines first through the door were zapped by a wave of blue-green light and fell unconscious before anyone could get to them.

They were eventually hauled from the room by the Atlantis equivalent of a gaff hook the team’s assigned engineer, Dr. Sukanya Farhad, had found in a nearby corridor.

Carson had declared the marines essentially unharmed, but all his efforts to awaken them had proved fruitless. They lay in suspended animation in beds, three breathing dolls, heart monitors beeping in perfect unison and no one any closer to figuring out how to revive them.

“It’s freaky,” Dr. Farhad summarized later that night as she and the hydrologist, Dr. Ibrahim, assigned with her to the ill-fated team huddled under a single light in Rodney’s lab, reporting in hushed tones to him.

Sumner had told them they were under orders not to talk to anyone—read: Rodney—orders they’d happily ignored. 

“We aren’t grunts,” Dr. Ibrahim groused, glaring around him as if one of said grunts was likely to leap out of concealment at any moment. (Was it Rodney’s fault if he’d fostered a healthy sense of paranoia in his scientists?)

“I didn’t sign up to be given orders by a man with an undergraduate degree from Ohio State,” Dr. Farhad agreed, exaggerating a shudder.

Rodney’s quirked eyebrow was enough to get her to cough up the particulars.

“Sarah hacked the personnel files,” Dr. Farhad revealed, leaning in with an almost unholy glee, eager to share her girlfriend’s findings. “Do you want to know what Prescott’s bachelor’s was in?”

Rodney manfully resisted the urge to ask. He really should have been setting a better example for his underlings, and he could picture Elizabeth’s face if she happened to overhear their gossip.

“No,” Rodney said in what he though was a fairly firm voice, considering he was dying to hear more dirt on “Doctor Prescott Ellis the Third, of the Cambridge Ellises.” He was pretty sure it took more than clenched teeth and a polo club hairdo to be an actual Boston blue blood.

“Do you have any insight into what the room was intended for?” Rodney asked Dr. Farhad, who was already shaking her head before he even got to the end of his question.

He didn’t bother asking Dr. Ibrahim, who’d loudly complained about being hauled away from supervising a major overhaul of the desalinization systems for what was, as he called it, a “jarhead scavenger hunt.”

“We didn’t see anything except the light. It was freaky,” Dr. Farhad repeated.

“Right, yes, ‘freaky.’” Rodney threw up some impatient air quotes, and Dr. Farhad’s lips thinned.

“If we’re done…” Dr. Ibrahim said, already sidling toward the door.

Rodney was filled with a sudden, deep dis-ease, as if he’d been plunged waist-deep into rising, frigid water.

“Just…” He hesitated, unsure how to express his concern. They wouldn’t be used to it, might not even appreciate it. “Be careful out there,” he finished lamely, earning himself a distracted half-wave from Dr. Ibrahim and an embarrassed grimace as answer from Dr. Farhad.

*****

It was 3 o’clock in the morning, the halls dimmed like the cabin of an Airbus on an overnight transatlantic flight, when Rodney found himself hesitating at the doors to the infirmary.

He’d woken from another dream of John Sheppard’s mouth and hands, muttered oaths and the weight of a lithe, strong, warm body against his own, and he’d had to flee his cool, too-quiet room, go anywhere but the space of waiting silence that promised to lead him back down into another dream that would wake him half-hard and ill-satisfied, a yawning, cold space behind his sternum and an infuriating lump in his throat.

He’d intended to head to the mess for a cup of the burned sludge that passed for third-shift coffee but had somehow found himself here instead.

As he shifted his weight from one foot to another, telling himself furiously that he was an idiot, the doors shushed open, betraying him to Carson, whose close inspection of a hand-held device caused a near-miss collision.

“Hey,” Rodney barked, leaping aside, though it was really his fault he was lurking there to begin with.

Carson startled, fumbling his hand-held before grasping it firmly in one hand and putting the other against his chest.

“Rodney! Is something wrong? Are you having chest pains again? Because I’ve told you about drinking so much coffee this late at night, it’s going to burn a hole in your stomach lini—”

“No, no,” Rodney stammered, unprepared and irritated with himself for not having an explanation handy. “I was just out…walking.”

It obviously sounded as lame to Carson as it did to him because the doctor raised an eyebrow and quirked his lip in that way he had when he was about to call bullshit.

In a tone that suggested he was doing Carson an enormous favor, Rodney admitted, “I just wondered how…they’re…doing.” He pronounced the pronoun like he was speaking of plague victims, and Carson’s other eyebrow joined the first.

Rodney wasn’t completely oblivious to the reputation he had amongst his colleagues (he hesitates to say ‘peers’). He’d never been the most astute observer of human nature, and no one who had met him would ever call him ‘empathetic.’ So yeah, admittedly, it was a little weird that he was taking a stroll at the witching hour to look in on three total strangers.

“I thought I could help,” he added, brazening it out, chin jutting, arms coming up almost of their own accord and crossing over his chest.

“How, exactly?” Carson asked, and Rodney shrugged. 

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll notice something you missed.” It was patented Rodney bluster, and he could tell that Carson was seeing through it.

Still, the doctor stepped aside, gesturing with the hand-held. “By all means,” he mocked, even throwing in a little half-bow for good measure.

The first marine was a woman with light brown hair and freckles scattered in an Orion’s Belt across her cheeks and nose. Her chest rose and fell in a mechanical rhythm unassisted by any machine; the precision of it and of the beeping of the heart monitor unsettled Rodney, and he shivered, looking across her to the other two marines, both men, whose chests were likewise rising and falling, the three monitors keeping tempo in perfect synch.

“That’s impossible,” he murmured, and Carson made a noise of agreement.

Forcing himself to look at the woman marine again, Rodney noted that her eyes seem to be tracking something beneath the thin cover of her lids.

“Are they dreaming?” he asked, and Carson nodded.

“Aye, brain scans indicate they’re experience a perpetual REM sleep.”

“You mean…they’re dreaming _all the time_?” Rodney’s hushed voice sounded horrified because he was.

“Aye,” Carson said again.

“Oh, Jesus,” Rodney said. He threw a hand over his mouth and took a staggering step away from the first sleeper, turning like a stumbling drunk to flee the infirmary before he was violently ill in the sere remains of a Lantean plant that no one had thought to throw away.

“Rodney,” Carson said gently, putting a hand on his hunched back and rubbing like Rodney’s mother had sometimes done in the early days of his childhood, when she’d still been trying to act like she thought mothers did.

Even after the spasms passed, Rodney was still shuddering, taking in deep, gusting breaths that wracked him on every exhale. 

Carson tried to get him to come back into the infirmary, and the idea was so repellent to Rodney that he dry-heaved, and Carson said, “Okay. Okay, Rodney, just take it easy.”

“Shower,” Rodney managed, moving toward the nearest transporter. “Thank you,” he croaked over his shoulder as the doors slid open and he stepped through.

“Rodney!” Carson called, but the doors were already closing, and Rodney slumped with shaky relief against the rear wall.

Back in his room, he stripped off his clothes, which were clammy, sticking to his skin with cold sweat, and made it to the bathroom, where the shower hissed on as if in answer to his wish rather than his action.

He stood outside the stall looking at it until he realized he was swaying and should either get in or go to bed.

The water needled hot and hard from the fixture, making him curse and clench his jaw until his skin acclimated to the punishment and the heat.

Arm braced against the wall, Rodney closed his eyes and dropped his head, letting the stream of water strike him on the back of his neck and across his shoulders, a pleasant sensation that grew to something more immediate as his shaking subsided and he began to feel more himself.

When the solid wall of a body against his back made itself known, he didn’t open his eyes, and he kept them closed when a hand snaked around his waste to wrap around his cock and hold it as if testing its weight.

As the hand began to stroke him, gently but firmly, an amused gust of air burst against his ear.

Still, Rodney didn’t look.

He knew what he’d see if he did—no hand but his own, no insouciant smirk; no slender, almost delicate feet; no impossible, gravity-defying hair.

His dreams had crawled out of his bed and followed him into the shower, but the feeling was real enough, the sensation of John Sheppard laughing as he pulled a moan out of Rodney, as he lit him up and made him shiver in an entirely different way than he had been, and Rodney let himself have it.

Let himself pretend that he’d been loved that way.

Sometime between the last dream and this, Rodney had recognized the tight, empty void in his chest for what it was: Loss. Grief.

An unending sorrow so vast that he couldn’t measure it except on a scale like the one they used in doctors’ offices to measure pain, only on Rodney’s one was “unsurvivable” and ten was “black hole.”

It was stupid. _Stupid_.

“So stupid,” he muttered to himself, breaking the dream’s hold, and he came back to the shower, lukewarm now, to his hand around his cock, rock-hard and wanting.

With a vicious curse and three harsh tugs, Rodney brought himself off and watched his spend swirl down the drain, taking the last of his heat and his hope with it.

“I’m losing my mind.” 

He said it just to hear it out loud. He didn’t need the confirmation, though. He knew what madness felt like—like a warm body beside him as he slid into restless, unfulfilling dreams, the tickle of wild hair, the rumble of a laugh shaking the bed beneath them, a sense of a future, dim and uncertain but real.

*****

John Sheppard was waiting for him when Rodney left his room the next morning. He was leaning against the wall opposite Rodney’s door with one booted foot propped behind him, hips forward in that ridiculous slouch he somehow made sexy.

Rodney ignored him, chanting _You’re not real, You’re not real, You’re not real_ in his head until he made it to the mess line, where he learned three things: 

They had finally run out of Earth coffee (not counting his private, secret stash).

Two more marines had been zapped by the mysterious blue-green light, this time exploring a small room off of one of Atlantis’ several desalinization plants.

And John Sheppard was impossible to avoid once you’d let him pull one out of you in the shower.

He was sitting at the table beside Elizabeth and across from Zelenka, who were having some sort of intense discussion, judging from the vertical furrow in Elizabeth’s brow.

As Rodney approached, they fell silent, Elizabeth studiously—too studiously—avoiding looking at him, and Zelenka leaping to gather his tray and hurry off before he could betray himself, thereby making himself look as guilty as the guiltiest person to ever guilt.

Rodney snorted under his breath, gave Elizabeth a terse nod in passing, and took his tray to his lab, where John Sheppard was waiting for him, one tight ass-cheek perched on the edge of a lab stool, an infuriating smirk on his perfect, stupid, dead face.

“Go away,” Rodney growled under his breath, and Miko, who’d come in on Rodney’s heels, said, “What?” with a squeak.

“Not you,” Rodney barked, sending her scurrying from the lab anyway. Mission accomplished, if said mission was to be a total asshole.

Rodney considered John Sheppard for a long moment. Then he closed his eyes tightly and recited a stress-reducing mantra he’d been taught once in high school when his parents had had the brilliantly misguided notion that he could somehow benefit from counseling.

When he opened them again, he was not at all surprised to see that a dead Air Force officer was still sitting in his lab.

Telling himself it was stupid and futile, Rodney nevertheless tried reasoning with him.

“Look, you’re dead, alright? And I’m sorry you’re dead. You seemed like a nice guy, for a military… person. But there it is—dead. Gone. Well, not _gone_ gone, obviously. But, you know: Not here. Not really. You’re a figment of my imagination. I’m overworked. And not getting enough sleep, thanks to you. So…shoo.”

Rodney tried brushing the major away with a gesture, but it was like herding cats, insofar as Sheppard smiled a little more deliberately and slouched a little more prettily and made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere.

He tried for several sweaty, muttering minutes to ignore John Sheppard.

He fiddled with a doodad that Corporal Spears had delivered to him a couple of weeks ago and then found himself wondering with dawning horror if Spears had been felled by the blue-green light earlier that day.

He checked his secure email and the science department’s email server he’d hacked upon arrival.

He sent Zelenka a knock-knock joke about black holes.

He considered one of four half-finished equations on the whiteboard.

He cursed Miko’s handwriting when he realized he’d been factoring for Zed when what she’d meant was Epsilon.

And then he gave up. Shoulders slumped, Rodney slunk from the lab and headed out for a walk, hoping that his hallucinations wouldn’t have developed that level of coordination just yet.

For a guy who avoided deliberate exercise, Rodney could really haul ass when he wanted to, which is how he found himself in a shadowy, faintly damp corridor somewhere in the bowels of the city trying to decide if he was hearing the voices of actual people or if John Sheppard had been joined by more ghosts.

It was with some relief that he rounded a corner to find a five-person team standing hesitantly outside a closed bulkhead door. Faintly from behind said door Rodney could hear water lapping. Either this was some sort of diving chamber or they had a bigger flooding problem than Dr. Ibrahim had led him to believe on his latest report.

“Huxley!” Rodney called, realizing only belatedly—by the marine lieutenant’s bemused expression—that he’d sounded uncharacteristically cheery. “What are you doing here?”

“Dr. McKay,” Dr. Chambers, one of the aeronautics people, said with a squeak, hugging her tablet to her chest. “Is this a surprise inspection?” Her eyes darted nervously from Rodney to her partner, a botanist whose name might be Maris or Partridge. Something like that.

“No, no. Just out for stroll.” He found himself affecting a nonchalant air, hands shoved awkwardly into his pockets, palms sweating. At any moment, he expected John Sheppard to appear and leer at him in a way most likely to tighten his breath and make his thighs tingle.

“Dr. McKay,” Huxley began diffidently. “Sir, you’re going to want to step back. We don’t know what we’re going to find behind that door.”

“Then I suggest you don’t open it,” Rodney shot back. “Any idiot can hear there’s water behind it.”

“Dr. Ibrahim said—” Chambers managed before Rodney turned his archest look on her, and she stammered into silence.

Really, Rodney thought, they should be made of sterner stuff if they’re going to be sent to places like this.

Then a pain in his temples knocked the breath out of him, and the next thing he knew his knees were screaming in agony and he was staring at a pair of combat boots from far too close.

The hand he was bracing himself against the floor with was cold, and he could feel the subtle no-slip pattern of the metal pressing into the skin, leaving waffle-marks.

Rodney shivered, a phantom of the pain that had felled him brushing against the inside of his skull.

“Wh-?” he tried, and then said, “What?” though it didn’t sound anything like him.

“Rodney, get up,” Sheppard said, sounding impatient and fondly exasperated and so alive that Rodney felt his chest seize, his heart clenching in denial of John’s death.

“J-John? What? What’s happening to me?”

Chambers’ team was gone and the bulkhead and the vague watery sounds. Only the ghost of John Sheppard remained, and he was wearing an increasingly unhappy expression.

“Get up, Rodney!” he said again and then reached down to wrap a hand too warm and far too solid for a ghost around Rodney’s elbow, helping him to his feet and steadying him as he swayed, trying to get his breath and his bearings both.

Rodney wrenched away, staggered into the wall on the other side of the corridor, and then pushed away from it in an unsteady but purposeful march back toward the inhabited section of Atlantis. 

As he grew nearer the living quarters, gym, mess, and labs, though, his uneasiness at being stalked by a maybe-not-totally-dead guy grew into panic as the unnatural absence of people registered on his already short-circuiting brain.

Something was wrong.

“Something is so wrong,” he whispered, staring with glassy-eyed shock at the empty mess hall.

His lab and all the others were likewise unoccupied.

The gateroom was an echoing abyss containing zero people.

Elizabeth’s office as empty too, but by then Rodney was expecting it.

He was alone on Atlantis except for the leering spirit of an Air Force major.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Rodney,” Sheppard warned him as he made his way toward sickbay.

Rodney clenched his jaw, in part out of stubborn refusal to listen to the advice of a dead guy and in part to keep his chattering teeth from giving away his bowel-loosening terror.

Sheppard was right: He really _didn’t_ want to go into sickbay. He suspected he knew what he’d find there. 

A nerve ticked under his eye, making him blink like he was trying to communicate in panicked Morse code.

He could feel the pulse at his throat, and he thought he might start hyperventilating. At least if he passed out, he wouldn’t have to go on.

Eventually, of course, and faster than he’d have liked, Rodney arrived at the sickbay doors, which were standing open, revealing a long, empty expanse, attenuating out into infinity.

“This is the worst episode of _Twilight Zone_ I’ve ever seen,” Rodney told himself. Behind him, John Sheppard snickered.

Of course, there was only one occupied bed.

Naturally, Rodney had to approach it. How could he not? Even knowing that what he would see might drive him mad—madder—he had to do it. The ghost behind him was a tangible presence now. Rodney could practically feel Sheppard’s breath on the back of his neck, sense the heat of his body through the thin layer of his uniform shirt.

In the dimmest corner of sickbay, the only illumination from the panel of monitor lights on the wall behind the bed, lay a familiar figure.

“No,” Rodney said, but that was the most he would indulge denial. Maybe logic had checked out when he’d started getting hand jobs from ghosts in his shower, but Rodney McKay would be damned if he’d let a little thing like sexual frustration wreck his long and storied career of pulling miracles out of the ether.

“Okay,” he said, though he didn’t like the way his voice carried in the hushed, shadowy space. It felt like people were listening, though in this case ‘people’ was probably generous—there was his doppelganger and the dead guy and his own internal voice, which was trying valiantly not to break out screaming.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he tried again.

“If I’m there…” and Rodney checked—there were vital signs on the monitor, and the figure’s chest seemed to rise and fall in a slow rhythm. He wasn’t going to check the thing’s wrist or throat for a pulse. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if it felt real beneath his sweaty fingers.

Rodney wiped his hands on his shirt-front and tried again to think.

“Obviously, I’m dreaming this. That would explain him—” Rodney pointed to the offensively pale thing on the bed. “And you,” gesturing at John Sheppard, who was leaning—what was with all the leaning, anyway? Wasn’t the military supposed to train these people to stand up straight? Wasn’t the ramrod look their whole schtick?

It had been a habit of Rodney’s since childhood to let innocuous digressions lead him astray from the more pressing and/or upsetting point. He dragged his mind back to the task at hand only reluctantly, however. He was tired and disoriented and just wanted to lie down and take a nap.

Come to think of it, the beds looked awfully comfy, and it wasn’t like Carson—or anyone else—would bustle in and kick him out for putting his feet up without taking his shoes off.

Rodney moved toward a bed in the far corner, away from the other him. He didn’t like to look too long at that still, waxy face, the strangely mechanical breathing, the sense of life slipping away with every exhale.

“Don’t do that,” Sheppard said. “Rodney, don’t!”

It was the most urgent Rodney had heard the major, and he thought maybe he should listen, except he was so tired, and really, could he be blamed for needing a nap? 

“Rodney, please,” Sheppard said, and he really was pretty when he begged, red lips parted, tongue darting nervously out to wet them. Rodney hadn’t known Sheppard long enough in real life to notice how beautiful he was. Sure, he’d remarked—privately—that Sheppard was physically attractive, but he’d never had time or courage enough to stare.

That wasn’t a problem now.

“Why don’t you come to bed with me?” Rodney suggested, patting the nearest horizontal surface and putting on what he thought was a passable inviting leer of his own. As this was not at all the sort of behavior Rodney typically engaged in, he rather surprised himself, but Sheppard didn’t seem at all surprised, judging by the way he sidled toward Rodney with more swing in his hips than was strictly necessary for walking.

When he was only a foot or so away from Rodney, well into his personal space, Sheppard paused, one hand on the bed mere inches from Rodney’s and one reaching out to rest at Rodney’s waist, where his thumb made restless sweeps against the material there.

Rodney shivered at the sensation, swallowed hard, and reached out with his own free hand to mirror Sheppard’s, rewarded by the way Sheppard’s breath hitched at the touch. Rodney slid his hand over the bed covers until their hands touched, too.

It felt like he’d closed the circuit on an electrical current, shocks arrowing to his core, his cock beginning to fill and his breath coming shorter.

Sheppard licked his lips, a deliberate show, and then stepped closer, until on every breath his chest was brushing Rodney’s. Then he leaned in, slowly, slowly, and pressed his warm, damp lips against Rodney’s.

Rodney gasped and surged against John, both hands going to his hips to drag him that little bit closer, until he could feel John’s response to Rodney’s proximity in the hard press of him through the cover of their trousers.

“Rodney,” John whispered, closing the space between their mouths for another kiss, this one open-mouthed, asking.

Rodney let John in, moaning at the hot sweep of his tongue, and then John was pulling away, saying, “Wake up, Rodney. Rodney, wake up,” and he was cold all over, not just where John’s body heat had abandoned him but everywhere—down in his belly, along his ribs, an icy fist tightening inexorably around his heart. 

His throat froze over, and Rodney gasped, unable to take a full breath, his eyelids fluttering frantically as he tried to make words, to ask John what was happening, what he’d done to Rodney.

“You have to wake up, Rodney,” John said, but it came out wrong, like he was shouting from the far end of a tunnel. 

Rodney blinked, and the figure of John stuttered like a digital image experiencing interference.

“Rodney,” John cried, even farther away, his voice thin with panic. “Wake up!”

“Jo—” he tried to say, but there was no air.

“Rodney, please!”

Pain knifed through his temple and he gasped, choked on the sudden inrush of air, and then screamed, the agony impossible to bear, a blinding, white-hot strobe of light scything away at his grey matter.

“Rodney,” a familiar voice said. 

He felt a hand on his cheek, and the pain receded to a dull, manageable throb.

“Open your eyes,” Sheppard said, and Rodney tried, managing at last to get the lids open to slits.

The room was blessedly dim, and there was no noise except for Rodney’s harsh panting and the relieved breath John exhaled in a gust.

“Hey, buddy, can you sit up? We have to get out of here. This room won’t be safe for much longer.” Sheppard’s arm was firm across Rodney’s back, his free hand on the nape of Rodney’s neck warm and solid.

Rodney shuddered violently and thrust away from him, scrambling on his ass until his back hit a cold, curved metal wall. He looked around, taking in for the first time his surroundings, which bore an unsettling resemblance to the inside of a tank.

Somewhere close, liquid was rushing, the sound growing louder, as if bearing down on their position.

“Y-you’re dead,” Rodney said through lips numb with cold—the room was freezing, the air leaving his mouth in white puffs.

“I’m not, buddy,” Sheppard promised, holding his hands out in front of him in the universal sign of _whoa, let’s slow it down here_. “Please. We _have_ to get out of here. This whole room will be flooded in minutes.”

“You’re dead,” Rodney insisted. There had been no little clouds to punctuate Sheppard’s words.

“Sure, fine, whatever you say,” the man-who-was-not-Sheppard said. “Let’s just go. We can argue about it outside.”

Rodney shook his head violently, squeezing his eyes shut to block out the sight of Sheppard, whose skin was turning a sickly gray marbled with blue-green veins.

He summoned the last of his strength, using the bulkhead behind him for leverage, and got to his feet. His knees were shaking—his whole body—but he gritted his teeth and shuffled toward the hatch, the round handle of which took all his strength to turn.

With a quiet hiss, the hatch unsealed, and he yanked, feeling the weight of it in his shoulders and back, and threw himself out of the tank—it had to be one of the back-up tanks for treated water—and into the black corridor beyond.

Just in time…he heard a roaring that wasn’t all in his ears and something slammed against the hatch, closing it, and then Rodney was alone, not even the ghost of Major Sheppard to offer him wildly inappropriate company.

Rodney tried to get his bearings, but there were no recognizable landmarks in this part of Atlantis; he suspected he was in one of the areas farthest from the central hub, unexplored until now.

He didn’t feel much like trailblazing. Mostly, he wanted to be warm and horizontal, burrowed beneath a mound of blankets with his favorite pillow over his head.

Rodney had grown accustomed to not having what he wanted, however, so he squared his shoulders and began the long, painful march back to the inhabited regions of Atlantis, wondering what he’d find when he got there.

He was fairly certain he’d hallucinated the disappearance of everyone on Atlantis, pretty sure the body in the sickbay bed also been a figment of his imagination.

Certainly, John Sheppard hadn’t been at all real, even if Rodney still got a residual zing of electric pleasure remembering their kiss.

“Pathetic,” Rodney scolded himself, and then he clenched his teeth because they were chattering. His gait old-man-like, Rodney eventually came to a cross corridor that looked vaguely familiar, and intuition rewarded him a few hundred feet later with a view outside to where the dim light of one of Atlantis’ moons showed him the pier where Carson sometimes liked to fish.

Sure of his location now and anxious to get into warmer clothes—he was freezing, if anything colder now than he had been in the tank—Rodney found a last reserve of energy, putting on a little burst of speed that brought him finally to his own door, which he palmed open gratefully, only to be brought up short by the sight of John Sheppard lounging on his bed wearing nothing but a smile.

“Rodney,” John drawled, drawing it out in the way he had that was almost but not quite a whine.

Despite the cold, Rodney shivered for a different reason.

John palmed his cock, stroking idly, grin wicked.

“Come join me,” he said, tilting his hips upward in lewd invitation.

Rodney swallowed and stepped into the room, letting the door shut behind him. He was getting tired of being trapped with a perverted ghost, but he supposed it was all in a day’s breakdown for his overworked brain and exhausted body.

Ignoring the picture of debauchery jacking himself off on his bed, Rodney stepped into the bathroom and began the slow process of stripping down.

The space was really too small for undressing, but he wasn’t going to get naked in front of Major Hard-on out there. Fingers clumsy with cold, Rodney struggled out of his too-tight shirt and his pants, remembering only after almost careening into the tiny sink that he was still wearing his boots.

These came off only after great effort, pain flashing up his arm when he whacked his elbow against the side of the sink.

Swearing, Rodney rubbed it and then stepped into the shower, which…failed to come on. He waved his hands around a few times, sinking sensation in his stomach telling him how futile it was to try.

Disheartened, too tired to climb back into his damp, stale clothes, Rodney toweled off briskly, stuck his chin in the air, threw his shoulders back, and stepped out into the room.

Sheppard was still there, though he’d stopped touching himself. His cock was hard, curving upward toward the dark arrow of hair on his belly. One graceful hand was tracing patterns through his chest hair while the other was spread against the grey coverlet on Rodney’s bed.

This hand, Sheppard turned over, quirking the fingers slightly in a gesture impossible to misinterpret.

Too tired to care now that he was making it with a ghost, Rodney marched over to the bed, crawled into the space between Sheppard and the wall, and fell face down, star-fishing his limbs, uncaring that they touched phantom flesh, which was hot like a furnace against the goose-bumped skin of his legs and arms.

Sheppard draped himself over Rodney’s back, his mouth sudden and hot on Rodney’s nape, startling a moan out of him. John’s mouth moved down the knobs of his spin, lingering overlong on the dip at the base of it, and then his teeth fastened around Rodney’s left cheek and Rodney shouted into the pillow and, overwhelmed, began rutting against the bed, frustrated by the lack of friction.

A hand snaked between his body and the bed and long fingers wrapped hot around his cock. Rodney struggled to give John room to work, and work he did, fingers gripping Rodney in a perfect tightness, jacking him with swift, firm strokes.

Rodney gasped, “John,” and John said, “Rodney, wake up!”

And as he came, eyes squeezed shut against the freight train of pleasure barreling through him, Rodney felt the world tip on its axis, felt himself plunging, a vertiginous drop that transformed his pleasure to dizzying nausea.

Even as John tugged the last of his spend from him, Rodney landed, coming back into his body with a breath-stealing impact.

He groaned and opened his eyes, staring around him uncertainly. Was he back in the tank? In a bed in sickbay? In his room with John Sheppard bringing him off?

No. This space was small, dry, and unusually square for a room in Atlantis, which had been built on more organic, fluid lines.

Rodney was propped against the wall at an angle that was sure to play hell with his back. His pants were open at the fly and a cool, sticky dampness told him he had, indeed, just had an orgasm.

An orgasm that Major John Sheppard had pulled from him.

Sheppard was kneeling at Rodney’s side, one hand curled and wet with Rodney’s spend, the other braced on his own thigh.

“You with me, buddy?” John asked.

Rodney’s first thought was that it was an odd way to address him, considering what they’d just done.

Then he realized that while they were the only two in the room, there was a blinking green eye high up in one corner that was probably a camera.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

“J- I mean, Major Sheppard. What happened?”

“Long story, Rodney. Right now, we should get you out of here and up to sickbay.”

“We?” Rodney squeaked, hating the thought that he’d had an audience for this particularly intimate moment.

John’s grimace was apologetic, regretful. He ran his clean hand through his hair. “Yeah, about that…” John’s eyes darted toward the wall to Rodney’s left, which turned out to hold a door. Obviously, there were people out there waiting for them. “I’m sorry,” John said, but Rodney wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. He wanted to ask, and he didn’t.

What if John said he was sorry for what had happened between them? Rodney didn’t want to hear it. He wanted…

Rodney waved a hand weakly, trying to forestall the excuses Sheppard was about to unleash.

“Later,” he muttered, hastening to tuck himself back in, pulling a face at the discomfort that entailed.

He had a spot of jizz on his uniform pants and more on the hem of his shirt, which he tucked in, effectively hiding it. Not that it really mattered. Whoever was monitoring this room would had to have seen everything.

He spared a thought for Sheppard’s career. “Are you okay?” he asked, which earned him a little bark of rueful laughter.

“I’m fine, Rodney,” Sheppard drawled. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

Rodney shook his head, thoughts too scattered to summon words, and then John was helping him to stand, surreptitiously wiping his hand on his BDU pants and hovering behind Rodney as they exited the little room into a corridor made bright with artificial lights apparently hauled in for the occasion.

The hallway was full of people, all of whom fell silent at Rodney’s emergence.

He tried to find in their faces some sign that they knew what he and John had just been doing, but all he could see was relief and—a surprise to him—real joy, apparently at his return.

Where he’d been that he had to return from, Rodney didn’t know, and he didn’t have time to ask because he was being hustled onto a gurney—despite his protests that he was fine, he could walk under his own power, thank you very much—and wheeled off to a transporter and then to sickbay, where Carson greeted him with such relieved happiness that Rodney momentarily put aside his deep confusion and let the doctor fuss over him.

Carson unfolded their working theory—that the room Rodney had entered with John and the team had been some sort of simulator meant to prepare Lanteans for worst case scenarios—as he worked to confirm that Rodney had suffered no lasting harm.

“Dr. Zelenka thinks that Atlantis chose you because of your position here. As near as we can tell, the machine is meant to tap into your own fears in order to challenge you to overcome them in a virtual reality environment.”

“Like a holodeck,” Rodney mused, trying to lay still as Carson ran yet another piece of diagnostic equipment over him.

“Aye,” Carson agreed. “Except this one doesn’t let you out until you ‘win’ the scenario.”

Rodney thought about the one constant in the nightmare scenarios he’d survived.

“So, Sheppard was, what, my…AI guide?” It made a certain twisted sense. By all accounts, the Lanteans had been more advanced in mind-body control and beta wave manipulation.

Carson hummed in answer, busy tapping away at his tablet.

That made sense, too, if Sheppard was actually to Rodney what Rodney thought he might be.

“Aye,” Carson added, absently, some moments later. “As your team leader, Sheppard thought he could get through to you. It seems to have worked, anyway.”

It was Rodney’s turn to make a noncommittal noise, content to let Carson work, a nervous flutter in his stomach telling him that he had one more significant scenario to enact before he could know for sure that he’d conquered his fears.  


*****

Later—a thousand tests and two thousand admonishments to get some rest later—Rodney was dozing in his curtained-off bed, letting the warmth of the blankets and the steady beeping of the monitors lull him into a half-sleep, when the curtain was disturbed to reveal Sheppard wearing a sheepish expression that made him look achingly young.

Rodney pushed himself into a sitting position over the major’s vociferous, though whispered, protests.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, not keeping his voice down. There was no one else in sickbay, and the duty nurse was in her office. Rodney had no reason to believe they could be overheard, and anyway, he wanted—_needed_—answers.

“You were unconscious for three days,” John protested.

“I know that.”

“The last six hours, your body temperature had fallen, and your breathing had slowed to nothing, and I—” Sheppard stopped, apparently having difficulty getting the words out.

Rodney watched his struggle with fascination, seeing the color flaring in his cheeks as John realized Rodney was looking at him.

“Are we—?” Rodney tried. Again, “Do we—?” He shook his head, marshaled his courage, counting on the third time being the charm. “Was it real?”

Despite not having clarified what ‘it’ he meant, Rodney knew John understood. He watched John’s mouth snapped closed, watching a muscle in his jaw ticking nervously. John nodded, a tight, almost unhappy gesture, and then he slumped against the bed, the strong curve of his ass just brushing Rodney’s thigh.

“Yeah, Rodney. We do. We are.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, momentarily at a loss for words. “Well, okay then.”

“Just okay?” John asked, snark tempered with warm fondness.

“Well, I don’t want to flatter you. You’re already far too arrogant.” But he ran his hand down the curve of Sheppard’s back and felt Sheppard shiver at the caress.

John swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing sharply in profile as he looked away from Rodney.

“I thought I’d lost you.”

“I thought you were dead,” Rodney countered.

“Not dead,” John affirmed, settling more firmly on the bed and pulling his leg up so that he could face Rodney and take his hand.

“Me either,” Rodney answered, tightening his grip on John’s hand and tugging him down, his meaning obvious.

John’s slow, wolfish smile sent a wash of heat all through Rodney, and he hummed in approval as John’s lips and tongue spoke in a different way of his relief at Rodney’s recovery.

Rodney spoke the same language as John, and they were both gasping when they at last broke apart, John resting his forehead against Rodney’s. 

The tickle of his ridiculous hair against Rodney’s forehead made him giggle in a wholly undignified way, but an answering rumble of laughter from John reminded Rodney that he was allowed to have this—comfort and pleasure with this infuriatingly sexy, outrageously self-sacrificing, beautiful man.

It had come back to him as Carson had bustled about with his scanners—the way the friendship he’d had with John had blossomed into something deeper and surer than anything Rodney had ever felt before.

He hadn’t thought those memories were counterfeit, but he hadn’t been sure, either, not until just now.

“So, are you in trouble with the higher-ups?” Rodney asked when John had sat back, apparently deciding that having sex with Rodney in the sickbay was not the best idea.

“I am the higher-ups,” John pointed out, looking insufferably smug.

“The men, then,” Rodney modified, waving an impatient hand. John knew what he meant. John always knew what he meant. It’s one of the reasons they worked.

“No one knows what happened, Rodney, except you, me, and Carson, and he got the edited version.”

“But the camera footage,” Rodney objected, hand waving more wildly still.

John grabbed that hand, trapping it against the bed and drawing Rodney’s focus.

“What footage?” John asked, a sly smirk quirking one edge of his lips. “I think there was a malfunction in the security system in that sector. Atlantis still isn’t at a hundred percent, you know.” 

Rodney took in a sharp breath. “No,” he breathed out, eyes widening.

John’s smirk widened in answer.

“She really does love you,” Rodney acknowledged at last, unable to keep a hint of jealousy from his tone.

“Not as much as _I_ love _you_,” John said quietly after a moment’s taut silence.

Rodney’s heart kicked so painfully in his chest he was surprised the monitor alarm didn’t go off. He swallowed, looking at John’s face, at the sincerity and love and uncertainty there.

“Right back at you,” he stammered, and then, feeling the inadequacy of the words, though they’d transformed John’s expression into a goofy grin, Rodney said, “I love you, too.”

John’s hand warm and alive in his, Rodney shoved into a dark box the fear that this, too, was an illusion, reaching up with his free hand to guide John back down for another breath-stealing kiss.

If it wasn’t real, Rodney didn’t want to know. 


End file.
